‘No.’
‘What do you mean? When?’
‘This afternoon.’ Seeing the expression on his face, she took his hands in hers and said, ‘It was just something weird. I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry.’
‘This isn’t just what you’re like, is it?’ he suggested, smiling sceptically.
She laughed and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Over the second pint they started to talk about other things— he told her how he had once owned a pizza-delivery franchise nearby, and how he had mortgaged it to produce a film (directed by Julian Shoe—the name made her laugh, he swore he wasn’t making it up), which had never found a distributor, forcing him to sell the pizza franchise and work instead as an estate agent at one of the snootier Upper Street outfits—Windlesham Fielding, pinstriped suits moving in the shop window. Though she knew by then that he had old links with the postcode, this was the first time they had been mapped out for her. He told her how—after a stint in the City which ended in minor scandal—he had set up on his own as an Islington estate agent. For a while he was successful. He owned up to having owned a Porsche—to having been a Porsche-owning estate agent. (She laughed at that.) He said he had lived in several thousand square feet of warehouse flat overlooking the canal. He had not seen the place for years and he suggested they walk over there tomorrow.
‘Okay,’ she said.
It was dark when they left the Nag’s Head. Under towering streetlights, the junction at Angel pumped people and vehicles like an exposed heart.
He was sufficiently upset by what had happened to seek a meeting on Monday with Toby, at whose wedding they had met. Toby had known her since university; they had been at Cambridge together, had shared history tutorials as undergraduates at Trinity. And Toby had something to tell him. She was married. Separated for a year or so, but still, so far as he knew, married. Her husband—he had left her, was Toby’s feeling—was some sort of photographer. Fraser King.
‘He’s some sort of pap. She hasn’t told you this?’ he said, surprised.
‘No.’
‘She’s not mentioned him?’
‘No.’
James thought, and then said that the only hint he had had of it was that nestling in the mess on the little night-table next to her bed—among the tumblers of stale water and screwed-up tissues—he had noticed a watch. A man’s watch. It looked like a pilot’s watch or something. A very macho watch. He had of course wondered who its owner was.
‘Probably Fraser’s,’ Toby offered. An overweight City lawyer, tanned from his Indian Ocean honeymoon and still in the suit he wore to the office, he was jiggling his portly knees and looking wistfully towards the door. They were in a pub and he wanted to smoke. ‘Sounds like the sort of watch he would have.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
‘A few times.’
‘What was he like?’
Toby shrugged. ‘He was okay,’ he said, putting the emphasis on okay so as to make it vaguely praiseful.
‘She’s said some things…’ James said, thinking aloud.
‘What?’
‘Things about the past. I don’t know. That she still has ties to the past or something. Nothing specific. That must be what she meant…’
‘Probably. Mind if I step outside for a minute?’
They went and stood in front of the pub. It was on a quiet, pristine Chelsea street—Toby’s local. In summer it looked like it was made of flowers, and even now it was festooned with elegant wintergreens. Toby sucked hungrily on a duty-free Marlboro Light in the sharp, smoke-blue evening air. ‘So how’s it going, generally?’ he said.
James told him it was going fine.
What he did not tell him was how on Saturday night after supper, though she had with some solemnity invited his hand into her unbuttoned jeans to feel how wet she was—very wet—she would not let him fuck her. He was left pleading there, literally kneeling on her living-room floor (Summer was away for the weekend again) while he unknowingly paraphrased Marvell.
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This Coyness, Lady, were no Crime…
He had not in fact actually fucked her since the night of the fiasco. She had not let him. In that sense the fiasco was very much ongoing—the latest thing was that she had started to talk of wanting to get him looked over by a doctor. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing.’ He promised her that he had no diseases. They were at that point in bed and he finally turned over and sulked.
No, he did not tell Toby these things.
‘Are you married?’ he said.
What followed—they were having a late supper in the trattoria with the plastic plants next to Russell Square tube—was surprisingly short and simple.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Separated.’
She was obviously prepared for this.
‘Were you planning to tell me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I should have told you already. It doesn’t make any difference, though. I haven’t seen him for more than a year.’
He was full of questions he wanted to ask her. He had imagined that they would spend the whole evening on the subject. In the end, however—it was obvious that she did not want to talk about it—he just said, ‘Is that his watch by your bed?’
And she said—‘Yes.’
(And the next time he looked, the watch was no longer there.)
So that was that. Except that that night, for the first time since the fiasco, she took the erection which was pressing fervently into the small of her back and pulled it into her. She immediately started to sob. In the very faint light that leaked in from the street he saw her scrumpled face, the shine in the tiny valleys to the sides of her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered, worried that he might not understand her tears. ‘It’s okay.’ She smiled tearfully. ‘It’s okay.’
*
Things must have been okay then, in mid-February—there was a minibreak. In the monochrome interior of the Eurostar as it flew through the Kentish twilight, she laid out the key facts—a medieval port, the largest in northern Europe, a sort of doublet-and-hose Hong Kong or Singapore. Then the Scheldt silted up and stopped the opening to the sea (a poor fate for a port), leaving it, for the last four hundred years, an exquisite fossil.
She had a list of things she wanted to see, and he tried to keep her warm—they would have needed a polar explorer’s microfibres to do the job properly—as she led them to grey-skinned emaciated Christs, and many quiet vistas of narrow little houses with their feet in the water. It was the water that made the strongest impression on him. The very sight of it, its black viscosity, made him shudder. In the morning, seen from the hotel window, steam stood thickly on its still, house-edged surface. At the end of each afternoon the sun shone on it, a strange cold yellow. It was heavy and heatless. He pitied the fish in it, and wondered why it wasn’t frozen. The streets were frost-scoured, and the tourist-trade horses—he pitied them too—steamed with their dung in the stone squares.
There was something almost hallucinatory about the place. The tangle of streets, squares and waterways. Everything was extremely small in the Middle Ages—that was very evident. For instance, the tavern they stooped into one twilight. It occupied the lower floor of a tiny house which teetered forward into its alley. There were only two tables, space for no more than a dozen people. The whole interior was made of wood, and smelled of warm smoke from the fireplace. They stayed there for an hour or two, the evening thickening in the quarrels of the windows, while she told him about John of Gaunt—that is, John of Ghent—son of Edward III and Chaucer’s friend and patron, who was born in the Flemish city in 1340 while his parents attended a summit meeting that went on for more than a year. Time, she thought, was different then. Partly for technological reasons. Partly because of the presence of a living idea of eternity. Look at Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna and Joris van der Paele. (They did look at it, in the Groeninge Museum.) The living presence of eternity—a painter striving to paint it. Who would try to paint such a thing now? And why?